Workflow Automation
The manual steps between your systems, automated as boring event-driven code that retries, records and shouts when it breaks.
Map a workflow ↗
What is workflow automation?
Workflow automation is the plumbing that removes manual steps between your systems — the copy-paste from an email into a CRM, the nightly spreadsheet, the approval sitting in somebody’s inbox, the invoice that gets keyed in twice. Most of it is event-driven code and integrations, and most of it needs no language model at all.
What separates automation that survives its first year is behaviour under failure: steps that can be retried without duplicating anything, a record of every run, and an alert when something stops instead of silence. We also cut before we automate — a step that exists because of a rule nobody can justify should be deleted, not encoded and preserved for a decade.
What an automation engagement includes
Process mapping
We follow the work as it actually happens, including the exceptions people handle quietly, and record where the hours really go.
The honest cut
Steps that only survive out of habit get removed rather than automated. Deleting work is always cheaper than orchestrating it.
Integration layer
APIs, webhooks and queues between your systems, with credentials, rate limits and backoff handled properly instead of by a script on someone’s laptop.
Idempotent, retried steps
Every step can run twice without double-charging, double-emailing or double-posting, so retries are safe by design rather than by luck.
Approval steps
Where judgment or liability belongs to a person, the workflow waits — with a clear queue, a timeout and an escalation path.
Runbook and alerting
Dashboards, failure alerts and a written runbook, so your team can see, replay and unstick a run without calling us first.
How an automation project runs
Watch the work
A short shadowing exercise with the people doing the task, plus volumes and timings. Documented processes and real ones rarely match.
Cut, then sequence
We agree what gets deleted, what stays manual, and what gets automated first — ordered by hours saved against effort, not by who asked loudest.
Build the happy path
The main flow end to end in a workflow engine that keeps state, so progress survives a restart or a downstream system having a bad afternoon.
Engineer the failures
Retries, dead-letter handling, partial-failure alerts and a replay path — the work that decides whether anyone still trusts it in month three.
Hand over and measure
Training, runbook and a dashboard of runs, failures and hours saved, so the business case can be checked rather than assumed.
Workflow Automation FAQ
A single well-scoped workflow is usually $6k to $20k; a connected set across several systems runs higher. We size by number of integrations and failure paths, because those are the real cost — the happy path is the easy part.
The tools we build with
Deterministic wherever determinism is possible: a workflow you can replay, audit and explain to a sceptic beats a clever one that only works on a good day.
Orchestration
Temporal
Airflow
Node.js
PythonEvents & queues
Kafka
RabbitMQ
RedisREST & WebhooksSystems & data
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Zapier
SnowflakeRun & watch
Docker
Kubernetes
Grafana
Prometheus
SentryRelated work
Related reading
Which manual step costs you most?
Tell us the process and roughly how many hours a month it eats. We’ll map it, tell you what to delete, and price what’s actually left to automate.